Welcome to Post-Crypto

Adapted from two posts published on 3 August 2026. A follow-up to Welcome to Post-CT.

From post-CT to post-crypto

With POAP shutting down and the Goldcard drain, I think we’re solidly moving from post-CT to post-crypto.

Failed as ideology, failed as an asset class for anyone who wasn’t first, succeeded as an R&D programme that produced four or five primitives it neither predicted nor wanted.

When I look back on the past few years:

• The honest casinos (Binance) survived the dishonest banks (Celsius).
• Every single thesis company failed (all of the Web3 / culture / decentralization circus).
• Every single company that was blatantly honest and stripped away the ideology, i.e. what @sapijiju did, won.
• Altcoins were a long on distribution being an asset class post-GME, which still holds.

The institutional deck and the token chart

Web3, or ‘consumer crypto’, was an absurdly intricate and catastrophically destructive Rube Goldberg machine, hurting both young adults and people saving for their pensions on both ends of the chain.

The ‘wagmi’ era, especially after FTX, is remembered as insiders selling tokens. In my opinion, that is a massive oversimplification, though I think @Taran already noted that the product of crypto was altcoins. That alpha and beta centre is completely dead now too, outside of a very narrow range of valuable assets.

The economic chain looked roughly like this:

Worker → pension → consultant → venture fund → company → exchange → market maker → retail.

This compresses two separate flows of money into one line. A pension contribution did not travel neatly into a retail token purchase. Deferred wages entered a venture allocation from the left. The final bid arrived from the right.

Retail had a less elaborate version of the same argument. The chart was up, the Discord was busy and the token had traded at a price that made everyone already holding it look really, really smart, obviously.

The institutional deck and the token chart made the same promise in different fonts.

OpenSea’s January 2022 funding announcement is a clean example of how the public activity fed the private mark. The company said transaction volume had increased more than 600 times during 2021 and raised $300M at a $13.3B valuation. People trading NFTs created the volume. That value could then enter a fund’s NAV and, eventually, an LP report.

No number needed to be fabricated, as the distortion accumulated as the number travelled. By the time it reached a pension trustee, the underlying fact was still true: people had traded a remarkable quantity of NFTs. WOW.

Yuga Labs raised at $4B while NFTs and ApeCoin traded around the same brand. Strong prices in the public market helped establish the value of the private business, while the funding round gave the public market another reason to believe the project had been validated by serious investors.

Consultants billed for advice. Venture managers charged fees on committed capital. Exchanges and marketplaces earned from trading. Market makers collected the spread when they managed to remain solvent. Remember the cottage industry of enormously overpriced marketing firms offering terrible brand strategy advice?

Ultimately, the people who got hit the most were young men trying to escape the permanent underclass and the retail allocator saving for their pension. At an industrial scale, a cottage industry of vultures was extracting value in the middle of these two honest people just looking for financial security or freedom.

At the end of the day, the only businesses with a moat and durability, and who followed through (mostly) on their promises, are those that really offered people a chance to do what they came here for in the first place without any kayfabe, which is to speculate.